


Making Up for Lost Time

by In_agony_and_ecstasy



Series: A New Beginning [2]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (kind of), After Armageddon't, Canon Compliant, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Implied Sexual Content, Knowing someone biblically, M/M, Making an Effort (Good Omens), Non-Explicit Sexual Content, ineffable husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 20:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20014399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_agony_and_ecstasy/pseuds/In_agony_and_ecstasy
Summary: Something has been on Aziraphale's mind. When he brings it up to Crowley, it seems that he's been thinking about it too, and for much longer.





	Making Up for Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place several months after No Time Left to Waste.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

In the months following Almost Armageddon, I had made room in my routine for something new – something I hadn’t done in over a century. 

I had found room for Crowley, literally speaking. If I was in my bookshop, so was he; If he was in his flat, so was I. Never would I have believed that I could adapt to such changes in my life, but I had, and with the ease of a gently wafting feather. It felt as if it was the natural order of things. We were where we belonged: with each other. Often, we were still minding ourselves. Crowley enjoyed napping and watching TV, and so while I read he’d do one or the other nearby. At his place, a recliner had appeared one day, as if it had sprouted from the floor like all the plants surrounding it. I liked to read in there, and secretly, when Crowley was elsewhere, reassure his plants that the berating was all just tough love on Crowley’s part. He wanted the best for them, after all. 

But I had found room for more than that. Kissing had found a home in my routine. Every morning, every night, and often in between. Even though I almost always leaned in first, Crowley’s lips always seemed to be waiting, as if he’d been holding his breath since the last. It was as if constantly arriving at a home the owner of which always swung the front door open to just before you had the chance to ring the bell, every time. 

I enjoyed it immensely, like I did almost everything humans invented. They could be, when they wanted to be, the cleverest of God’s creations. 

Kissing, in fact, was the seed that had planted a _relentless_ thought in my mind. 

Most humans did more than kiss. Most humans _made love_. 

I thought about this all hours of the day, and by all hours of the day, I did mean _all_ of them, since I hadn’t slept since the night I first confessed my feelings to Crowley. 

This thought of mine was quite the nuisance. No matter what I did to relieve myself of it nothing worked. I did all I normally did: Read, seek out more books to read, scare away customers that might want to buy the books I read, eat, drink and occasionally, when I felt like it, perform miracles for humans that pleased me (I never much went out of my way for it these days since I didn’t like doing Heaven favors much anymore). 

This thought was not of the inappropriate variety or even the fantasy variety. It didn’t get me “hot” as the humans might say. I wasn’t even sure I could recognize such a reaction in my corporate form. Rather, I thought about it indifferent to its subject matter. I thought about it the way I thought God might have thought about it when designing a means for living things to reproduce: Why is it necessary and how can it be done?

Of course, my answer to the first was actually that it _wasn’t_. We’d made it this long, after all. Until recently, it had never crossed my mind. I’d never seen Crowley bat an eye at it either. There was one time I thought maybe he had – the time he told me he had _lots_ of other people to fraternize with. But I’d gotten over that insecurity after Almost Armageddon. 

He wanted me. _Miraculously_ , Crowley wanted me. 

But…to what extent? Was I a fool to think he could ever want me like that?

Finally, I had to say something. 

It was just before dinner. Crowley had taken up cooking, I thought, to impress me since he hardly ever ate. The best part was he was very bad at it. Though it infuriated him to no end when he burned it or put too much of this in it or forgot to do that to it – I was all the more endeared. 

Right then, he was chopping onions, wiping his eyes on his sleeve repeatedly, and muttering to God that his shirt was not just designer but designed better than majority of Her creations, _especially_ onions. 

“What kind of food makes you cry when you cut it?” he was saying, “What were You thinking? Oh-oh I know! I’ll just give them food that makes them _cry_ because that’s _exactly_ what will alert the humans this is edible and not _poisssonousss_!” 

I smiled from where I sat, ever so patiently, at his brand new and very glossy kitchen table. He must have been in really quite the mood if his snake lisp was coming through.

“Blasssted vegetable,” he continued. 

He’d had some wine.

“Crowley?” I said then.

“Not even close to done, Angel. And don’t even _think_ of miracling it up yourself after putting myself through this!”

“No need to be so dramatic, dear,” I said, “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

He paused then and looked over his shoulder at me from the counter space he was cutting the onions on. 

“Oh? Tell me then,” he said, and waved a hand vaguely in the air as if to say _I’m over it. Go on._

I cleared my throat, and even then the fluttering in my stomach was so persistent I could hardly find my voice. 

“Have you ever thought about, um, well,” I started, as I wrung my hands together. “Have you considered…that humans…usually, well – well, make love?”

Crowley halted his ministrations and stepped back from the counter. He sauntered toward me and, like always, found the nearest wall to lean against. He was looking at the ceiling, but I didn’t think he was seeing the ceiling. Nor did I think he was avoiding my eyes. It looked like he was thinking hard about something.

Then he huffed, rolled his eyes, and went back to the onions. “Naturally, yes. I’ve had to tempt more than a few deviants in my day. Had to oversee a thing or two in Greece, if you get my drift. And come to think of it, I hardly call what they do these days lovemaking, Angel. Really, it’s…well, it’s not lovemaking, that’s what. It’s not like they…I mean just because they know each other biblically doesn’t mean, you know, that they know each other literally. Hasn’t meant that in a long time.”

I furrowed my brows. It surprised me, but his words were quite disappointing. 

“You don’t think it would be lovemaking…if it was us?”

Crowley outright hissed as he dropped the knife. A moment later he snapped his fingers and the fresh blood and cut he’d accidently left on his finger disappeared. “I’m sorry, _what_ about us?”

My face burned. “If it was us. If we made love. Would it be… _making love_?”

Crowley’s eyebrows raised and he blinked too much too quickly. Abruptly, he turned away from me to lift the cutting board and dump the onions into the pot on the stove. “I s’pose it would be,” he said, quietly. “But…Well, I can’t speak from experience. But from what I can tell, when humans _do_ make love and don’t simply get off…it’s – well. It’s to be close to each other. As close as two _human beings_ with _human_ limitations can be.” 

I kept wringing my hands. Adjusting my bow-tie. I wished it didn’t hurt to hear him talk like this. How silly of me. 

Crowley ducked his head into the fridge. This time he pulled out jalapeños. Maybe I ought to change the subject. Maybe the scene he was about to make would cheer me up.

“And you know, Angel,” he continued, as he selected a different, smaller and more precise knife to cut with (he liked the knife part of cooking the most). “You and I – we – there are no limits to how close we could be. After all, we’ve already switched bodies. Nothing more intimate than that. And if we wanted closer, we could – I mean I could turn myself into light particles and you could become a plant and I could spend a century shining on your leaves as you grew into a tree, for Satan’s sake. I could – I could be the ocean and you a boulder on the beach and spend a millennia smoothing you over into a pebble. We could – we could combust and occupy the same area of space, our atoms intermingling for eternity. I mean – there’s nothing we couldn’t do. Nothing – nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He looked at me now, his expression so tender. “Alpha Centauri was not a random choice, you understand? I didn’t pull it out of a hat. It’s – you understand? It’s everything.”

I swallowed and nodded. I did understand. I knew why he picked Alpha Centauri. And it wasn’t as if there was anything I wouldn’t do either. As if there was anything I didn’t _want_ to do. 

But I _liked_ being human. Or, acting like one. I liked eating and getting drunk and reading books and wearing clothes and feeding ducks. 

I liked holding Crowley’s hand, spooning him – what an excellent idea! – combing my fingers through his hair while he slept and I read, and oh, I _loved_ kissing him. 

Crowley rested an elbow on the counter, his expression now concerned. He turned the knife over in his hands. 

“You’re right,” I said. “Of course. I – I was simply curious.”

Crowley set the knife down. He strolled over, almost as if to get a better look at me. Then he sat against his table, resting his hands on its ledge. He tilted his head back, but this time it was like he was looking through his ceiling at the stars.

“But, let me tell you, if we _did_ make love, it wouldn’t have limitations either.”

I jerked my head up to look at him. He peered at me in his periphery, and, truly swaggered back towards the stove. He returned his attention to – or appeared to return his attention to, like a performance – the knife and cutting board. 

“I would make sure of that,” he continued. “We wouldn’t have to worry about a _thing_. No slippery contraception. No filthy sheets. No popped buttons or stuck zippers. No annoying preparation. And _no_ pulled muscles. It would be when we wanted it, and when we began it would be as if we’d already been doing it since the beginning of time. And we could go for as long as we wanted. As many times as we wanted. Make it better than it has been for anyone else in the world. It would be _nothing_ like human lovemaking. Human lovemaking would look like watered-down Pinot Grigio in comparison to our _Château d'Yquem_.”

He smiled crookedly at me. I looked away bashfully.

This whole spiel of his, just then, revealed three things to me that I had been wondering about to the point of madness:

1) Crowley really didn’t care if we had sex. He had never cared. Which meant, when he told me that all he’d ever wanted was to be on the same page, the same side, “out in the open” about it, he wasn’t lying. 

2) Crowley really didn’t “care” if we had sex, but that didn’t mean he was indifferent to it. Mainly, he wanted to be with me, forever, as close as we could be whatever form that might take. If I didn’t want it, he didn’t. But if I did, well, he most definitely did too. 

3) It had been on his mind as well, and probably just as long. 

He absolutely would have brought this up to me at some point if I hadn’t brought it up first, I decided. But, he would have done it differently than I had, I was sure. Much the same way he had “asked me out” so to speak. But I wasn’t going to endure 6,000 years of him implying he wanted to make love to me. 

Nor was I going to act oblivious to it or politely decline for that long again. 

In fact, I felt _quite_ hot at that very moment. 

I rose from the kitchen table and went to him. He’d been about to start chopping, but I placed my hand on his. He turned to face me, opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t get the chance to. He saw me lean in, and like every other time he’d been waiting at the door. He closed the gap and we were kissing, and kissing like we never had before. The difference between going for a walk and running to a destination. Urgency. Direction. Intention. 

Crowley snapped, and we fell up. I first felt my wings stretch to their greatest length, and I exhaled in relief. Then the coarse familiarity of an ancient garment around my body. My skin misted, a sensation I hadn’t felt since a time long before. Before Heaven had mimicked – however much it liked to pretend that they were the ones influencing humans, and not in fact, the opposite – Earth’s cities, with their skyscrapers and roads and pristine tile floors. 

When heaven was all there was. Before fallen angels. Before earth. Before the universe. Before galaxies, cosmos, stars. When the angels had nothing to observe, and so it didn’t matter if their view in every direction was obscured by iridescent clouds. Crowley had fallen so long ago, but he remembered. He remembered every last shimmering detail. 

Only now, it was just us, without any others to judge us. He was in his original garment too. With his original hair. His true eyes. Charcoal wings enveloped around me. He looked at me with the intensity of God’s light.

“Now,” Crowley said, under his breath, “this is how it’s done.”

And he knew me in our own private Heaven.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're curious, my Tumblr URL is oryx-and-thickney@tumblr.com.


End file.
